Thursday, May 1, 2014

Storage Project

Our home has been in dire need of a real storage solution for quite some time. We've hit our 4 year mark in this house and accumulated enough baby stuff and other stuff that the closets and shed and garage were much to be desired. As a new home, there wasn't anything along the lines of shelving in the garage, the closets only had one rack, and the attic doesn't have any walking space so that was off limits.

A while ago Patrick made a doorway in the coat closet to get underneath the stairs for extra storage. It's truely amazing what goes into the projects we decide to do. Even after planning and research there is always something we hadn't thought about. For instance, during this project we realized in order to stay up to fire code we had to make a door for the hole we cut, tacking on a few more hours of extra work. Even though it's in the closet there still needed to be an air tight door. So, now we have a tiny hobbit door under our stairs.

Another surprise was all the garbage we found under the stairs. The houses in this neighborhood were built quickly and it's becoming more and more clear the corners that were cut in order to save time. It must have been quicker to wall in construction garbage and pop cans than to take 5 minutes to pick it up.

The boys loved "helping."

Anyway! Patrick did a great job on these cabinets. Even though there were a few hiccups with getting the correct lumber and improvising when we had forgotten the measurements would be different with said lumber it all turned out as we planned.

With cabinets in the garage we were able to better organize our car maintenance stuff, camping things, holiday decorations, and baby clothes and more. Now the garage makes sense. Everything has it's place. We were even able to make room next to some food shelving storage for a future freezer. That's the part I'm most excited about because it's basically an extension of our kitchen storage.

To the right is the food storage and an open space for the freezer. And, notice the shoe shelf. That was Patrick's first solo wood DIY project. To the far right is the treadmill followed by a table saw and chop saw (not pictured) and weight bench. It's truly amazing what can fit in such a small space when it's contents are well thought out and organized.

It was a beautiful weekend so the boys were happy clams playing with the hose and sprinkler.